Philip Treacy, milliner extraordinaire, by Deirdre McQuillan .
The extraordinary creations of the celebrated Galway-born master milliner Philip Treacy, consistently make headlines and were once fittingly described as site-specific sculptures. From a two-foot-high 18th-century French galleon in full sail constructed from feathers and black satin to surreal butterfly pillboxes and a gilded ram’s head in Florentine straw, his hats are known for their drama, originality and flamboyance. Treacy’s chapeaux have adorned the heads of the world’s most famous women from royalty to rock stars and society queens earning him innumerable awards and the nickname Crown Prince. The designer, who started sewing at the age of seven at home in Ahascragh, is credited with having revived interest in a forgotten craft and encouraged a new generation of young milliners to give vent and form to their wildest ideas.
What is it about the work of the Irish sculptor Eilís O’Connell that has led to her having created, in this most difficult and masculine medium, over thirty permanent site-specific installations in Britain and Europe, including the sensual, orchid-like Unfurl (Fig 1), a bronze commissioned by Kensington Borough Council and the residents of Kensington Gate, to celebrate the Millennium?
O’Connell subtly combines a number of different elements that give her work both a sense of physical vitality and poetic metaphor. It is monumental yet intimate, atavistic yet contemporary. From discarded agricultural tools to birds’ nests and whale bones she appropriates the quotidian and the natural to create dynamic forms in stone, steel, resin, plaster and bronze. Like her poetic compatriot, Seamus Heaney, O’Connell looks to the archaeology and topography of her Irish homeland for inspiration but the ideas she finds there are filtered through a considered relationship to architecture and geometry. The work is never soft: emotion is always tempered by intellect and painstaking technique to combine something of the muscularity of Richard Serra with the female sensibility of Barbara Hepworth. Science and mathematics meet the natural world within her organic and biomorphic forms. Inside and outside coalesce. In the layered and slippery space of contemporary culture she has created objects that generate a unifying narrative and suggest a philosophy of interdependence rather than of confrontation, an openness and desire for contact and inclusivity, rather than a brittle postmodern autonomy, which unapologetically recalls the timeless resonances of Brancusi.
Anne Hodge and Peter Harbison examine the visual evidence of Daniel O’Connell’s unusual conditions of imprisonment in the Richmond Bridewell, Dublin
Ursula Burke, Emma Donaldson and Deirdre McKenna explore the mutable topic of time at the F E McWilliam Gallery, Banbridge. Claire Dalton looks at their responses